I grew up speaking three languages, so it is difficult for me to say what my native language is. I would say that my strongest language right now is English, but that does not mean I translate things in my head when I speak in another language, it is more that I might have trouble finding the right word in that language. And even then, I don’t try to think of what the word is in English, but whether there is word for the concept I am thinking of in the language I am speaking.
This happens when I am writing about my day, for example, where I will simply write the word or the feeling in the language that I feel most appropriate captures that for me. Which means that it will be interspersed within a sentence, though more often it is several sentences in a row. This is even extends to the 4th language I learned, because if I experienced it in that language that feels like the most suitable expression.
And that is really what made it difficult to learn a 4th language. I was not used to translating things and then expressing them, I was used to simply constructing them in my head “natively” and then expressing them, but with a limited vocabulary that is impossible to do. Once I progressed past a certain point, I could manage fairly well, though I am by no means really fluent.
I quit taking French in high school, but it’s such a beautiful language that I try to keep up (by reading or listening to books that I’ve already read in English). Came in handy on a European trip… in France, of course, but also surprisingly, in Germany.
We were failing miserably at communicating with a native, and finally I asked if he spoke French: “Sprechen Sie… Französisch?” “Ya, ya, eine petit peu!” Because neither of us were very good, we both spoke slowly using easy words. (To this day, I have NO idea how I knew the word ‘Französisch’…)
Like other here, my memory pulls up Spanish and French words indiscriminately. I call it “my messy Romance language filing cabinet”. But I would LOVE to be able to get good enough to think in another language. Maybe I’ll work on that… that’d be a good bucket list thing.
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Our French teacher told us that. So one class, in walks Mikey ("Non, non. Tu es Michel!" “Je suis… Mikey…” “Sigh…”). And he’s all excited because he finally had a dream in French! The teacher was very impressed and asked him what happened in the dream. Mikey shrugged, “No idea. Everybody was talking French.”
I am fully fluent in American Sign Language, and worked as an interpreter for many years. When I am conversing in ASL, I think in ASL. When I was at Gallaudet University studying ASL (having a total immersion experience from July of 1987 to May of 1988), I eventually thought in ASL even in my private thoughts, dreamt in it, and talked to myself in it.
I hit-and-miss speak Yiddish, but I still think in a funny mixture of English and Yiddish, with some Hebrew, that is very much like what we speak in my aunt & uncle’s house, when I talk to my aunt, uncle, or any of my cousins on that side, even if we are strictly speaking English for the benefit of someone else in the conversation.
I am learning Spanish. I have been studying it since August of 2018, and had an immersion experience in the summer of 2019 for six weeks, when I took an intensive class at a school in San Jose, Costa Rica. I still am hesitant in Spanish, but I can carry on a conversation. I tend to speak in an ungrammatical mix of English and Spanish when I am speaking Spanish.
However, I don’t really think strictly in English when I think.
If I’m speaking in English, I’m thinking in English. Interestingly, a large part of my internal monologue (or more accurately “dialogue”; I tend to have discussions inside my mind with other people) is also in English instead of my native French. This may be because much of my media consumption is in English, or because most people whom I’d want to make aware of my point of view speak English.
Unfortunately, I don’t speak any other language well enough to be able to meaningfully think in the language. So if I’m speaking a language other than French or English (something I haven’t done in a few years), I usually have to translate in my mind from one of the languages I speak fluently.
This is really common. When I was learning Spanish, words often came out in English. But the last few times I tried speaking Spanish, it tended to turn into Italian instead. My Italian is stronger than my Spanish (though I speak neither language especially well), and they’re two similar enough languages that it’s easy to get confused. And both are similar enough to French that I essentially construct sentences in either of them by mapping French sentences to the target language.
Speaking of mutual intelligibility between Romance languages, that’s something the Ecolinguist YouTube channel does very good videos about, as well as mutual intelligibility between Slavic languages which I also find interesting due to knowing a little bit of Polish.
See, my problem is that in middle school, they had some “immersive” language program where you took a semester of Spanish, a semester of French, and a semester of German, and then chose one of those to continue for the next three semesters. I learned enough vocabulary in both, but the syntax is so similar, that after choosing French for middle school, then dropping it for Spanish in high school, sentences like, “Mein Francais estas muy debil,” feel like a damn near second nature. It wasn’t until I started practical use of Spanish that I was able to purge the German, but the French still sticks in there.
Years later, I picked up the bits and pieces of Russian, for work, and it tends to slip out when I’m at the gym with a heavy lifts. “Odim, dva, tree, chitiri, pyads!”
To be clear, I do not comfortably speak any of the languages. I just know enough bits and pieces to mangle them into a creole I call “Tripler-ese.”
Tripler
Sometimes, I’ll say to myself, “Me gusto uno molodyets.”
We’ve done exactly that. The Great Courses has excellent beginning and intermediate Spanish courses. The instructor is a professor in Atlanta and the course is methodical, comprehensive and logical. Comes with workbooks. We’re on our third go-through of the beginning course and will start our second round of the intermediate course soon. A good website is called “News in Slow Spanish”, which is exactly as described.
Back in the day, I spoke a fair amount of German. And I still speak enough Thai to get around comfortably. But foreign languages have always been a chore with me, and I could never get out of “thinking in English” mode.
I learned English as a second language. When I started reading substantial amounts of it in University and also conversed with English speakers online I started thinking in it when using it.
I believe linguists refer to this as “interference.” I noticed it when I started studying Indonesian after having achieved a moderately good vocabulary in French - French words would come out when I was looking for Indonesian. At that time I didn’t know it was a recognized phenomenon, and described it as having “a drawer in my brain for foreign languages, I open it and whatever’s on top is what I find first.”
To answer the OP, my “background thinking” would always be in English, since I am not truly bilingual. However, like many upthread, if I’m in a conversation in Indonesian I don’t plan an answer in English and mentally translate it; I formulate it entirely in Indonesian.
I used to edit a bilingual technical journal, and while I certainly didn’t have the facility to truly edit in Indonesian - I left that to native speakers - I did proofread Indonesian materials. Doing that, I’d be mentally operating fully in Indonesian while reading. But let’s say I found a questionable item and needed to step back and look something up - I’d probably slide in and out of English, sort of like “harus cek dulu, mungkin ejaan itu salah … where’s that paper we published about public transport in Jakarta, got it, I think it’s on page 7…iya, gitu, yang betul kata ini…”
This is something more people should be aware of. Especially Americans. We tend to forget that virtually nowhere is as limited in languages as the US. My mother grew up in Norway. She learned English from 4th grade up, and also learned both French and German for her course of studies starting a few grades later. So 4 languages.
We were vacationing in Greece, and she needed to communicate with someone who’d rented us bicycles. That person didn’t speak much English, and my mom only knew a little Greek. But, they were able to converse enough by both using a mixture of French and German, with a few words of English and Greek thrown in. So it can be worth seeing if you can converse in another language if you know one.
As relevant to the OP, there are a few words in Norwegian (my 2nd language) that sometimes are mixed into my thinking. Like, I’m thinking about an object, in English, but the name of the object will be the Norwegian word. I’m not positive why it happens. My guess is that it may be that the Norwegian word is my native word for that thing. I lived in Norway for several years as a young kid, so some words I learned first in Norwegian.
My mother’s parents were Ashkenazic Jews from Slovakia, who spoke both Yiddish and Slovak. Yiddish was the language they learned first, but Slovak was the language they used to most in her family, because even though their parents learned to speak English, they never spoke it well enough to feel comfortable using it in the home. My grandmother came here as a very little child, though, and went to school in the US from K on, and by the time she was an adult, really thought of English as her primary language.
She did something sort of odd, though-- albeit, something I know happens in many multilingual families. She used mostly English with her children, but used Yiddish words for body parts, especially the “private” ones, and used Slovak words for foods.
I grew up the same way. I went to preschool apparently a thoroughly English-speaking child, but I referred to body parts by Yiddish words, and occasionally did not know an English word for something-- ditto with many food words.
When I was a Mormon missionary in Japan, there are some words we always used in Japanese, even in English sentences. When on our missions, it was really easy because all the other English speakers around also were missionaries and spoke Japanese. but it was harder when I went back and tried to tell people who only spoke English about my experiences. So, I decided the stop doing that and just speak English.
Of course, there are some words which are easier to express in one particular languages.
Looking back at the OP, I see I didn’t really answer it. When I was at my most fluent in both my first and second languages, yes, I switched which one I thought in based on which I was speaking or hearing.
It’s been a long time, and I’m less fluent now. I am not capable of thinking entirely in Norwegian any more, but I think I would again if I lived there for a few months, or was otherwise immersed for long enough to get back my fluency
In 2010: Odyssey Two by Arthur C. Clarke, about a joint U.S.-Soviet space mission, the Americans speak Russian to their Russian colleagues, while the Russians speak English to their American colleagues, so that both sides are not only being courteous and also have the chance to improve their skills in the other language.